A few weeks ago, I had a conversation with a current WebSphere customer about the potential value they could derive from the use of IBM Workload Deployer. Right away, this customer saw value in the consistency that a patterns-based approach could afford them. It was clear that patterns eliminate the uncertainty that can make its way into even the best-planned deployment processes. Initially though, the customer questioned the value of being able to do fast deployments because, in their words, "We don't deploy WebSphere environments that often." So, we continued our discussion, and then they asked an important question that I encourage all of our users to ask: "Why don't we deploy our WebSphere environments more frequently?"

It is interesting to talk with our WebSphere users that have a long history with our products. Often times, they have been taking a shared approach to WebSphere installations for many, many years. They develop innovative approaches and isolation schemes that allow them to carve up a single WebSphere installation (cell) amongst multiple different application teams. This allows them to avoid having to setup a cell for each application deployment and saves them the associated time. However, having talked to many different users taking this approach, it is not without its challenges.

As was the case in the customer I mention above, users typically made trade-offs when electing for larger, shared cells. As an example, if you have multiple different application teams with different types of applications using a single cell, applying fixes and upgrades to that cell can be a lot more complex. After all, you now have to coordinate plans across a number of different teams and find a window that fits all of their needs. For the same reason, trying incremental function via our feature packs is much more arduous in these types of cells. Additionally, administrative controls become more complex since teams with varying needs all require administrative access. Admittedly, this gets simpler with newer fine-grained security models in WebSphere Application Server v7 and v8, but it still requires organizational discipline and process.

At this point I should be clear that I am not denigrating the shared cell approach. It can work well, and we have many facilities built into the WebSphere Application Server product to support that model. However, if you are using this approach and you find yourself stumbling too much for your own liking, then I would strongly suggest that you explore the patterns-based approach of IBM Workload Deployer. By deploying patterns that represent your WebSphere cells using IBM Workload Deployer, you can quickly and consistently setup multiple WebSphere Application Server cells to support the varying needs of your application teams. You will still avoid spending an inordinate amount of time installing and configuring cells as that is an automated part of pattern deployment, and your application teams will still get the resources they need. Further, this can liberate your application teams in terms of how they apply maintenance, install upgrades, and absorb new function in the form of feature packs.

I am not suggesting a complete pendulum swing in your approach to how you manage multiple application environments. There is definitely a happy medium in terms of how many cells you end up with. After all, you do not want to trade in one set of problems for the problem of managing way too many different cells. However, I do think that decomposing monolithic, multi-purpose cells into smaller, more purposeful cells can be beneficial. In the course of thinking about this different approach, you may come to the same conclusion that the customer I mention above did. IBM Workload Deployer's rapid deployment capabilities are indeed valuable if you take a slightly different view of current processes.

When it comes to IBM Workload Deployer, I have no illusions concerning our competitors. They are out there, and they are constantly on the attack. Their dubious claims aside, I know this because I still get asked quite frequently to explain the benefits of IBM Workload Deployer versus some other general purpose cloud provisioning and management solution. So, while I have done that many times in various forums, I figured it was time to address the subject here on the blog.

When comparing IBM Workload Deployer to the other available solutions, I honestly feel comfortable saying we have no direct competition. I know you believe me to be biased, and rightly so, but let me explain why I think the competition is much more perception than reality. To do this, I want to focus on the patterns-based approach that IBM Workload Deployer takes to cloud provisioning and management.

Let's start with virtual system patterns in IBM Workload Deployer. Virtual system patterns allow you to build and deploy completely configured and integrated middleware environments as a single unit. These patterns build on top of our special IBM Hypervisor Edition images that bottle up the installation and quite a bit of the configuration of the underlying middleware products. Further, when using virtual system patterns, IBM Workload Deployer manages and automates the orchestration of the integration tasks that need to happen to setup a meaningful middleware environment. For instance, when deploying WebSphere Application Server you do not need to do anything on your end to deploy a clustered, highly available environment. When deploying WebSphere Process Server in this manner, you do not need to take any administrative actions to produce a golden topology. You just deploy patterns and the images, patterns, and appliance take care of the rest. Of course, you can add your own customizations and tweaks in the pattern, but we take care of the common administrative actions that would otherwise require your care.

I am not sure of a better way to say it, so I will be blunt: When deploying products delivered in IBM Hypervisor Edition form, no other solution compares to the virtual system pattern capability offered by IBM Workload Deployer. It is not even close. Can you provision products like WebSphere Application Server or WebSphere Portal using other cloud provisioning tools? Sure, but you should be aware that you will be writing and maintaining your own installation, configuration, and integration scripts. It is also likely that you will end up developing a custom interface through which deployers request your services (something not necessary when using the slick IBM Workload Deployer UI). All of this takes time, resource, and money. More importantly, this is not differentiating work and distracts from the real end goal: serving up applications. IBM Workload Deployer can deliver this operational capability right out of the box, and it can do so in a way that costs less than custom developed and maintained solutions.

When considering IBM Workload Deployer versus the competition, it is also important to consider the new virtual application pattern capability delivered in version 3.0. The virtual application pattern capability is a testament to IBM's thought leadership in and commitment to cloud computing for middleware application environments. Virtual application patterns take a bold step forward in raising the level of abstraction beyond the middleware environment and up to the most important resource in enterprise environments: the application. With a virtual application pattern, you simply provide your application and specify both functional and non-functional requirements for that application. When ready, you deploy that pattern, and IBM Workload Deployer sets up the necessary middleware infrastructure and deploys the provided application. Moreover, the appliance will monitor and autonomically manage the environment (i.e. scale it up and down) based on the policies you specify. Quite simply, this is a deployment and management capability our competition cannot match.

There is more to consider than just patterns though. The appliance makes it really simple to apply maintenance and upgrades to environments running in your cloud. It can autonomically manage your deployed environments (through policies in virtual application patterns and the Intelligent Management Pack for virtual system patterns), and it effectively abstracts the underlying infrastructure of your cloud environment. This abstraction is the reason IBM Workload Deployer can deploy your environments to PowerVM, zVM, and VMware environments. It also makes it easy to deploy the same environment to multiple different underlying platforms, thus accommodating typical platform changes that happen as an application moves from development to production. The best part of all is that the deployer’s experience is the same regardless of the underlying infrastructure since the appliance hides any platform idiosyncrasies.

The bottom line is that the appliance is purpose built to deploy and manage middleware and middleware application environments in a cloud, and as such, delivers immense out-of-the-box and ongoing value in this context. I should also point out that the design of the appliance acknowledges its purposeful nature. The CLI and REST API interfaces allow you to integrate the appliance into the operations of those general purpose provisioning solutions. In this way, IBM Workload Deployer acts as a middleware accelerator for your cloud computing efforts. This means that if you do have a general purpose solution, IBM Workload Deployer can still provide considerable value and let you avoid developing a considerable subsystem dedicated to deployment and management of middleware in the cloud. We believe in this type of integration, and have in fact built it into our own IBM solutions.

I could go on and on differentiating IBM Workload Deployer from the competition, but I hope my comments above give you a good context on why I think the appliance is in a league of its own. Of course, I always appreciate comments and feedback, so don't be shy!

In my opinion, declarative deployment models are key to the entire notion of Platform as a Service (PaaS). That is, users should concern themselves with what they want, but not necessarily how to get it. The PaaS system should be able to interpret imperatives from the user and automatically convert that to a running system. In this respect, I think the new virtual application pattern, and more specifically policies, in IBM Workload Deployer takes a giant leap toward a more declarative deployment model.

In IBM Workload Deployer, policies allow you to 'decorate' your virtual application pattern with functional and non-functional requirements. In other words, they provide a vehicle for you to tell the system what qualities of service you expect for your application environment. To put a little context around this discussion, let's examine the policies available in the virtual application pattern for web applications. Specifically, let's look at the four policy types you can attach to Enterprise Application, Web Application, and OSGI Application components in this pattern:

Scaling policy: When it comes to cloud, the first thing many folks think about is autonomic elasticity. Applications should scale up and down based on criteria defined by the user. Well, that is exactly what the scaling policy lets you do. You simply attach this policy to your application component, and then specify properties that define when to scale. First, you choose a scaling trigger from a list that includes application response time, CPU usage, JDBC connection wait time, and JDBC connection pool usage. After choosing your trigger, you decide the minimum and maximum number of application instances for your deployment, and then you choose the minimum number of seconds to wait for an add or remove action. At this point, you can deploy your application and IBM Workload Deployer will monitor the environment, automatically triggering scaling actions as needed.

JVM policy: I would be willing to bet that nearly all of you tune the JVM environment into which you deploy your applications. The JVM policy allows you to take two common tuning actions, setting the JVM heap sizes and passing in JVM arguments, as well as attach a debugger to the Java process (especially useful in development and test phases). You can also use the policy to enable verbose garbage collection (invaluable to understanding heap usage patterns for your application) and select the bit level (from 32 or 64) for your application. Again, all you have to do is attach the policy and specify the properties. IBM Workload Deployer will take care of the required configuration updates.

Routing policy: The routing policy provides a simple way to specify virtual hostnames and allowable protocols (HTTP or HTTPS) for your application. Attach the policy, provide the virtual hostname you want to use, select the desired protocols, and that's it! Remember, once you set the virtual hostname you will need to update your name server to map the hostname to the appropriate IP address.

Log policy: During the development and test phase, it is likely that you will want to enable certain trace strings in the application runtime. The log policy allows you to provide trace strings for your application, and it makes sure that the appropriate configuration updates occur in the deployed environment.

While this is not an exhaustive explanation of each of the policies above, I hope it gives you a basic idea of what they are and how to use them. To me, declarative deployment models are going to be a crucial part of making PaaS successful, so I am really excited about the notion of policies in IBM Workload Deployer. What do you think?

In a post not long ago, I mentioned new enhancements to virtual system patterns in IBM Workload Deployer. A prominent part of those enhancements were updates to pattern construction that allow you to order virtual machine startup, order script package invocation, and include add-ons that provide system level configuration options. Recently I uploaded a demonstration to YouTube that highlights some of these new capabilities. Specifically, this provides a brief look at ordering and add-on enhancements.

I hope you take a look, and even more importantly, I hope to see some feedback. If you have something you would like to see captured in a demo, let me know and I'll work it to the top of a long and continually growing list!

If you are reading this blog then I am pretty sure that you are interested in the agility that can be achieved by rapidly provisioning middleware systems and standing up virtual applications in a private cloud environment. However there are other aspects of agility that you should also consider. One such aspect is the ability to build applications that can be easily maintained, updated, and extended. This is where OSGi technology comes into the picture.

If you have been working with the IBM Workload Deployer (or watching some IBM Workload Deployer demos) you may have noticed a category of components in the virtual application builder called OSGi Components.

Maybe you already know all about OSGi applications and the value they bring to an enterprise. Or, perhaps you noticed this and decided that you would search for some more information on this odd acronym and just what an OSGi application is all about.

In a nutshell OSGi technology is a way to define dynamic modules for Java. It provides a standard way to encapsulate components (called bundles) with metadata that define versioned package dependencies, service dependencies, packages exported, services exported, etc... basically everything you need to know about this bundle so that it can be connected up with other bundles to support a particular solution. These bundles can then be grouped together into applications and dynamically wired to fulfill necessary dependencies at runtime. The OSGi framework provides all of the necessary capability to manage the dependencies and resolve any problems.

Those who leverage OSGi technology benefit from improved time-to-market and reduced development costs. The loose coupling provided by the OSGi framework reduces maintenance costs and facilitates the dynamic delivery of components in a running system. Of course there's a lot more to it than just that ... involving portability across different environments, achieving the appropriate level of isolation or sharing within an environment, and integrating with the many different technologies and patterns already available today. I don't think I know enough about OSGi to do it justice here. But fortunately for me (and you) there are several experts who can make it all clear.

One such expert is Graham Charters and there is a great opportunity to hear him introduce this topic and also participate in a dialogue about the concepts and what they mean for your business. Graham will be leading a Global WebSphere Community Lab Chat on Wednesday of this week (July 20th) entitled: How can OSGi make your enterprise more agile. Graham is the IBM technical lead in the OSGi Alliance Enterprise Expert Group and an active participant in the open source community implementing many of these standards. So register now for this free session and learn how OSGi can make your enterprise even more agile.

Virtual Application Patterns are one of the major new features in IBM Workload Deployer v3. You've heard this concept discussed on this blog before and it is really a revolutionary way to manage your applications in a private cloud environment. With Virtual Application Patterns you provide declarative information about your application including functional and non-functional requirements of that application. You get to focus on the application rather than the middleware configuration and IBM Workload Deployer takes care of all the details necessary to launch your application with the criteria you specify. This application-centric approach radically simplifies the deployment of applications in a private cloud. And it is not just the deployment that is simplified; it is also the monitoring, metering, logging, security, caching, etc ... that is consolidated and simplified as well. Everything is custom tailored for the particular application type to provide a significant level of integration and optimization for elastic, efficient, multi-tenant, automated management and execution of that application workload.

In IBM Workload Deployer v3 there are two different types of virtual application patterns provided out of the box; a pattern for web applications and a pattern for database applications. It's no accident that these are also the two most heavily utilized types of applications in most enterprises. Of course more patterns will be appearing in the future and you have the opportunity to create your own custom patterns ... but these first two patterns can cover a substantial number of current application workloads.

So why am I introducing all of this again? Well, I want to make you aware of a new article that was just published which covers virtual application patterns in a very consumable way with enough detail and screen shots to get you started down this path. It is appropriately named: Easy virtual app automation using Workload Deployer . It really does a great job of covering not only the web application pattern - but it also introduces the database pattern (DBaaS) and shared services. If you are about to embark on virtual applications this is a great place to start.